As of this post, there are 15 different types of Facebook ads and over 1,000 ways to target those ads. The type of Facebook ad you select should vary depending upon your objectives. Facebook offers some of the greatest ad values available right now, and the largest active audience on the planet. Take a tour through our top five picks to learn more about how you can leverage the globe’s most successful social media site.

1. Facebook Dynamic Product Ads

We put this one first because it helps you solve your biggest problem: abandoned shopping carts. Most reliable metrics show that roughly 70 percent of customers walk away from their carts without sealing the deal. Insert the Facebook pixel into your website code, and it will track how your shoppers browse and the items they dropped in their carts. It then kindly reminds them of those products dynamically when they’re scrolling through their newsfeed. It will take some developer resources to set this up correctly, but it’s well worth it. Returning business is easier to convert than new business, and customers appreciate ads that are more personalized.

2. Facebook Multi-Product or Carousel Ads

Our second favorite type of Facebook ad is also one of the most popular. A carousel ad allows sellers to showcase up to 10 images of popular products in a single ad which a customer can scroll through. They are especially popular with lifestyle, fashion, and home goods sites, although they can work with almost any physical product. This becomes a virtual browsing app for you, exposing potential customers to a range of what you offer. Use the call to action feature so people getting familiar with your brand have an opportunity to respond to something they like. Experiment with the dynamic optimization feature which reorders images based on the best-performing images and links for each individual who engages with your ad.

3. Facebook Lead Ads

Facebook’s lead ad design technology enables customers to send you their information without leaving the confines of Facebook. Users are more likely to submit their details to claim a coupon or get a discount code if they’re never asked to click away from the app. Make sure to include a call to action, and test different actions to make sure that customers know where and what to click.

4. Facebook Video

Users love videos, especially colorful videos that are easy-to-follow DIY how-tos, such as recipes, crafts, gardening, and home improvement. You have up to 4GB to play with, which gives you plenty of leeway for graphics, length, music, and narration. Subtitles are recommended since the audio is typically muted. You can find all the specs for video ads here.

5. Promoting Facebook Page Likes

Page likes were the first type of Facebook ad most users became familiar with. It’s pretty simple: promote your brand or page and let users become a follower by clicking “like” right in the ad without having to visit your page. For consumer-facing brands with a big online presence, increasing page likes with your targeted audience is important, especially if you want to involve them in future promotions, content campaigns, and other offers. Get more direction from the source on this page.

If you’re still new to advertising on Facebook and need more advice as to what type of content to promote, that’s what we’re here for. Let us know how we can help, and schedule an informal chat with us today.

Customer and brand loyalty is basically dead. Because of the staggering amount of product choices available on the internet, people don’t shop brands, they shop deals. There are still, however, many brands that have such a distinct story that customers are drawn to them. How well you pull customers to your brand depends almost entirely on branding your business. Marketing is all about communicating a clear narrative.

How you differentiate your brand matters to customers. These creative e-commerce branding tactics will eventually help your brand stand out from the pack. If you want to be memorable, you have to do things that customers will remember. We’ve laid out a structure below that we hope will inspire you to explore your branding strategy in new, exciting ways.

Brand Loyalty is Still Happening

The hipster clothing line Madewell has seen consistent increases in their sales year after year. This isn’t just because of their quality. Their online story is succinct and consistent. If you take a cursory look at the site, it’s clear that they know their customer. Frequent shoppers of the brand will tell you that the homepage is dynamic. The company gives its customers a reason to check in frequently to see what’s new.

Another classic example of brand loyalty is, of course, Apple. People love their iPhones and MacBooks. The company has been so successful with its brand story over the years, they’ve done little to change it. The site is still designed as a destination, with flagship stores complementing the company’s online presence. All of their messaging ties back to the single concept of quality and style above all else. Replicating Apple’s success is almost impossible, but there are some great takeaways that still work today.

Your Five Branding Tips

1. Tell Your Story

Branding your business likely starts with you. Your story is something that your competition can’t own. It’s also something that no one can take away from you. Your story is personal and unique. Try this exercise: spend 10 or 15 minutes writing down what inspired you to start your company. If you’re not a writer, tell the story to a colleague, record it, and write it down later. For example, Steve Jobs became as iconic as his computers, so much so that mentioning his name in a piece about marketing borders on cliche.

You don’t have to be as famous as Steve Jobs to tell a compelling personal story. Blake Mycoskie probably didn’t think he’d ever be a household name. He had a simple idea after traveling through Argentina in 2006: he wanted to find a way to give needy children the world over a pair of shoes. It’s why, as the founder of TOMS, he continues to use “Chief Shoe Giver” as his corporate title. When he founded his shoe company, he continually tied everything back to his core principle of giving. Today he runs a global brand whose humble origins started with his inspirations.

2. Define Your USPs

Your unique selling points are the core of your brand story. Everyone in the company, whether that means two or two thousand employees, needs to know them intimately. Keep the list down to no more than 10 items. They should be as specific as possible. Your USPs aren’t aspirational: they are your company’s essence. Even if your product isn’t unique, your company is.

The cloud project management software company, Basecamp, uses its USPs brilliantly. Basecamp’s e-commerce branding features language that appeals almost exclusively to small businesses. As a company, they are signaling to a potential client that they are the go-to for entrepreneurs and startups, which helps them target everything from social media marketing to online ad targeting.

3. Think Unconventionally

About 10 years ago in Los Angeles, a young chef needed a way to promote his new catering food truck that would create buzz without a big budget. He’d invented a new sort of street food (a taco filled with perfectly grilled Korean barbecue) and needed a creative way to promote it. He used a then fairly new communication platform called Twitter to tell his burgeoning foodie fans where he was parked every night throughout Los Angeles. His daily tweets were both practical (telling everyone how to find them) and exciting (his early inventory sold out quickly, creating a sense of urgency for his early customers).

That chef was Roy Choi and his Kogi trucks kick-started the food truck revolution, all because he figured out a creative way to turn eating street food into an event. How can you use event marketing for your business? How do your products connect to your customers in real-time and how can you exploit that in fun, unusual and original ways? Remember, Choi wasn’t trying to start a revolution. He was just trying to sell tacos.

4. Show your Gratitude

Every time you ship an order, do one thoughtful thing for your customer. Use creative, inspirational packaging. If you have an environmental message, for example, highlight that your boxes are made from recycled content, or show how your protective materials can be reused. Send handwritten notes when you can; you can do this more than you realize when your volume is still low.

Go beyond discounts. All customers expect a 20% discount code and an expiration date along with it. What can you easily give away to every customer on his or her birthday? What can you do for the first 500 people who follow you on social media platforms on their social media anniversary (the day they started following you)? Give away things that are useful and special and that relate back to your brand story and your USPs. Have fun with it and your customers will have fun with you.

5. Be Consistent

The average page visit lasts under a minute. You don’t have long to grab and hold people’s attention. Every single element of your site needs to be as professional as possible. Use pros to take photos, and use a skilled, experienced designer to create your graphics. Consult user experience experts to advise you on your site layout and navigation. Your brand is an ecosystem of message and quality. If a new customer seeks you out, make sure that what they see on the site and the overall experience is as good as the message that brought them there.

Branding your business isn’t as simple as throwing up a tagline and making a few ad buys a month. It’s a holistic process that requires passion, sincerity and vision. The quality of all of your content plays into this as much as your logo and your product research.

Please contact CrewMachine today and find out more about how our experienced product team and extensive team of writers and editors can help you create the content that helps you tell your brand story.

Brick and mortar storefronts lure customers inside with creative visual merchandising. Whether it’s on main street or the internet, the retail space is highly competitive and you have a matter of seconds to grab a buyer’s attention with your virtual storefront.

Visitors make purchasing decisions based on three key components: attraction, engagement and motivation. Your branded environment compels customers to return, engage and buy based on how well you present your inventory in mobile and desktop formats.

In Brief: What E-commerce Visual Merchandising Should Accomplish

Think of your homepage as where you begin your conversation with your customer. Telling your brand story includes many consistent elements:

Compelling and vivid images of your products, including a hero image wherever possible

The more successfully you deploy creative online visual marketing, the more your homepage:

Engages visitors instantly

Increases overall individual sessions

Increases average order value (AOV)

Examples of Excellence in Online Visual Merchandising

We culled the web for examples of fantastic visual merchandising in online retail. These brands may not be household names, but they are brilliant standard-bearers for how e-tailers, both large and small, should grab their customers as soon as those buyers walk in the virtual door.

Social proof features: while not all brands can make hashtags work on the homepage, Rad Soap Company entices the buyer to go to the company’s Instagram page.

Need some help diagnosing your homepage? We can do that. In fact, we’d love to give you a content health report for free. Email us or call us at 888.870.8744 to learn more about how CrewMachine can help you develop road-tested marketing strategies to increase sales.

AI has been impacting the online experience since the advent of search way back in 1996 when Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google. Smart engines already supply customer recommendations in online shopping (Amazon) and viewing recommendations (YouTube, Netflix). As machine learning evolves, there are countless other ways that applications of artificial intelligence in e-commerce will improve more than just the online shopping experience.

See it, Search, Buy It

Imagine going to a wedding or a special event and falling in love with a friend’s pair of shoes. Visual search helps you find exactly what you want based on something you saw. Take a picture of those shoes, and an AI engine could find multiple samples of something similar. This saves time on the consumer side and increases discoverability for retailers.

Virtual Personal Shoppers

Not everyone loves to spend hours searching for a new jacket online. That’s why companies like, North Face, are introducing artificial intelligence applications that shop for you. Software is faster than humans and may be better at finding specific items based on simple logic rather than emotion. Think about how Waze helps you find the right route based on traffic patterns. It’s using real data to get you there faster, although that route may differ from your habits or assumptions. A virtual shopper could lead buyers to online e-tailers and products they may not have otherwise sought out.

Improved Personalization

There are many ways to gather information about both what you’re shopping for and how you shop. Currently, ad re-targeting reminds users about items that were abandoned in their carts. Eventually, AI could gather even more information about how specific, individual shoppers search for goods, research, and curate information before making a buy. This information, in turn, may lead to smarter and more customized ad platforms and recommendation engines that improve the personal shopping experience.

Integration of AI and CRM

Machines are better equipped to analyze large blocks of data more quickly than humans. All products and brands have to compete on customer service, and AI could help scale customer service more effectively. Imagine that an upset customer is more accurately routed to the right team based on more smarter voice-responsive software. Software could do a better job of helping customers find products and direct them to the right answer to their query or concern.

Using Natural Language Processing for Search

Sometimes, when putting search terms into an engine, it take a few tries before you get the results you want. NLP, or natural language processing, is one of the fastest-growing forms of artificial intelligence in e-commerce because it will help customers get from point A (searching) to point B (conversion) more quickly and with less frustration. NLP enables machines to learn how humans speak and can translate that speech into all types of behavior. Because this is such a wide-ranging field, the applications for this technology will impact everything from shopping to medicine.

CrewMachine is using AI to drive how e-commerce brands create and manage online content and fix problems too great for human teams to solve alone. We’d love to talk more about it, so contact us to set up a demo today.

Instagram’s worldwide audience of 500 million people is growing. The company added 100 million users between 2015 and 2016 alone. It boasts more users than Twitter and is second only to Facebook in its overall reach. In 2015, a study from Pew Research reported that 35 percent of those users visit several times per day. The social media platform is becoming just as much of a media juggernaut as its parent company, Facebook, and there’s good reason why. The image-based posts are easy to scan, fun to follow and attractive to consumers from a wide array of age groups and cultures. If you’re selling to consumers, you need an Instagram footprint. Here are some tips to improve your Instagram marketing strategy and increase engagements on the platform.

More Instagram Demographics

In that same study by Pew, they revealed that 55 percent of all 18-29-year-olds use Instagram. Over a quarter of people who make over $70,000 per year have an account as well. An impressive 32 percent of adults online who live in urban areas also use the platform. One conclusion of this data: female millennials who earn $50,000 to $75,000 and live in urban areas check in with the photo sharing app more than any audience.

Do Your Homework

Before you create your first post on Instagram, check out what your competitors are doing. Follow the accounts of consumers who represent your ideal customers. See what they like, follow and share. Creating an Instagram marketing strategy isn’t as simple as throwing up a few images with hashtags. Spend some time researching the marketplace and be prepared to invest resources to build a sustainable, meaningful and targeted campaign.

How to Sell Products on Instagram

There are some tried and true tactics that you can use to leverage the platform to your advantage.

Create a Contest

People love giveaways, discounts, and sweepstakes, especially if they are meaningful. Offer a small item every day to the 10th person who shares a post and follows your business on both Facebook and Instagram, for example. Come up with creative ways to encourage likes and follows with incentivized rewards. Run a photo contest and promote the winner with a sponsored post.

Use Hashtags

Hashtags are common on all social media platforms, and they assist your audience in finding you. They are especially popular with Instagram. The more targeted your hashtags, the more you will boost your followers. You can use up to 30, but sticking closer to 11 augments engages Instagram’s algorithm the most effectively.

Use Professional-Quality Images

Even though social media apps are free to use, it doesn’t mean they don’t require investment. If you don’t have a good eye for imagery, use an outside party who does. You may need to invest in a professional photographer or enlist the help of a consultant who is an Instagram expert. Use filters and photo editing apps that help you create vivid, exciting images.

Swap Reel for Real

Instagram users love to see real people. Even if you sell lifestyle products, like fashion and accessories, images of professional models probably won’t resonate as much with the Instagram crowd as actual people photographed while wearing or using your stuff.

Post Short Videos

When you’re scrolling through Instagram, you’ll see a lot of videos. The platform allows anyone to post a video up to 60 seconds long, giving you leeway to post a fun, creative and colorful post. Remember that they need to tell a visual story, so use graphics and images that tell the story instead of relying on audio.

Connect and Communicate

Social media is all about direct contact with your audience. Engage, respond, repost and answer questions as publicly as you can. Millennials are more drawn to brands with a direct, honest message, so use simple, truthful language.

Monitor Your Activity

As with any marketing strategy, metrics matter more than anything else. Deploy an app like Iconosquare to track successes. The app provides a real-time monthly analysis, enabling you to tweak campaigns as needed to grow engagements, follows, and shares.

A strong social media presence is essential for consumer-based businesses today. A well-executed Instagram marketing strategy furthers your brand message and builds trust with new customers when you use it correctly.

Need help? CrewMachine has built proven marketing strategies that increase sales and traffic to your site. Please contact us and learn how you can take advantage of our network of writers, marketers and social media experts that can teach you how to best use Instagram for your e-commerce site.

For an ecommerce brand, competition isn’t just other stores or services in your field. It’s the billions of other web pages online. The need to stand out from all that information in a meaningful way continues to grow. In such a fierce environment, reputation management — strategically shaping how customers and the world at large views your brand — requires a combination of business acumen and authenticity so customers relate on a personal level. Here are three ways to anchor your brand’s web presence in maintaining a strong public perception.

First, do your research. Find out where your target personas spend their time so you know which platforms deserve your greatest focus. Then, get savvy. Don’t just have a Snapchat account, for example — add relevant, non-salesy content that inserts your brand into the bigger conversation. Otherwise, your company comes off as disingenuous, which is a death knell in social media circles. Instead, be willing to commit to transparency with your audience and monitor their reactions.

One key to establishing authenticity in social media is your ability to engage naysayers and detractors. You don’t have control over the posters on social media, so instead you must allow the messages to develop and participate openly in the process. Sound scary? Sure. But it’s one of the best tactics for your brand. Trust is crucial, and customers are more cynical than ever about traditional marketing messages. Instead, look to an industry behemoth like Microsoft, which encourages staff members to blog openly about their opinions regarding the company’s products. When Windows 8 released a few years back, not all the employees were fans, and their blogs said so. That sort of truthfulness opens the door for your company to hear your clients’ biggest complaints. You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken, so find out what people are saying.

Understand Your Brand’s Impact Beyond Products and Services

Another offshoot of social media is the overall knowledge sharing among customers and their friends about all aspects of a company. Buyers no longer care solely about the quality and price of your product. Your company’s social impact, employment policies, global presence and awareness, environmental concern, and even financial integrity all weigh into their choice to invest their time and money. Take, for example, the $20 billion hit Volkswagen has taken on market capitalization since its emissions scandal. That cost reflects much more than paying for fixes to its diesel cars. Consumers and investors alike no longer trust the brand to deliver on its environmentally conscious promises.

Even your leadership’s personal choices influence whether customers are on board. Chick-fil-A still battles reputation management issues years after leaders apologized for maligning certain sectors of society. The hunting habits of the owner of Jimmy John’s became such a focus on Facebook and Twitter that an organized boycott is ongoing. Source: Flickr user MSLGroup Global

Know the Power of the Review in Reputation Management

If you’re of a certain age, you may remember a commercial that defined the concept of viral marketing long before YouTube existed. The model apparently tells two friends about the product, and they tell two friends, and so on and so on.

What was true in twos and fours in the ’80s is exponentially more powerful now thanks to review websites. A single star rating improvement on Yelp equates to 5 to 10 percent more sales for a company. If you’re managing a small ecommerce brand, reviews are doubly important because high rankings on review sites offer word-of-mouth marketing opportunities with little effort on your part.

Of course, you do have to make some effort. Complainers naturally take to review sites more than complimenters, so encourage positive, authentic reviews from happy customers, too. You also have to exercise discipline as you interact on such sites. When someone runs down the company you’re working so hard to build up, the urge to argue publicly and refute the claims is strong. Don’t do it. All you’d be doing is planting skepticism in the minds of future readers who think your company doth protest too much. Thank them for their feedback, and offer ways to resolve specific issues.

Product reviews within your site are valuable, too. Provide easy mechanisms for rating features and leaving comments so buyers have simple comparison tools.

With these three tactics, your ecommerce brand is on its way to reputation management success. Keep monitoring and participating in conversations regularly and, above all else, listen to your customers. They know better than anyone in your office what your brand’s reputation really is.